In the twentieth century, natural history is understandable as history when it narrates the slow change of species over the millennia. In the early modern period, however, a history of nature meant something different: the story of nature's “deeds and works” seen through the human experience of them. As such, early modern natural history may have been atemporal in form, describing in the moment of writing natural phenomena as people knew them. Yet the writers of those histories understood that people had written differently of nature in past times and separate places. By the seventeenth century, natural historians were asking the same questions that the recorders of civil history posed: What constituted evidence of “historical” truth? Whom should one believe? Was it possible to write a universal history, or did history reside, like truth, only in the particulars?

When Francis Bacon linked history with experience in his Advancement of Learning, he cut to the heart of this debate over truth, imagination, and authority in the writing of natural as well as civil history in England. Bacon himself narrowed the field of authorities on natural history by cutting off both Greek philosophy (for “at that period there was but a narrow and meagre knowledge either of time or place,”) and folk wisdom about the natural world. In The Great Instauration Bacon claimed to be more troubled with them.